My One True Love

My one true love, V, who is to me like Brooke Magnanti’s “Boy” though circumstances prevented our going beyond the first kiss (in a just and fair world, imbued with the spirit of a compassionate God, we would have), and after trials and tribulations (jealously thought to be exotic), found her way through the occult and pharmacological to Jesus and, while under the influence of divine passion, was eventually led to marry a fellow Jesus devotee, with whom she propagated offspring, none of whom appear to reflect her singular piquant charm, perhaps because their dna was dilluted by more gross dominant paternal genes. The spell that was cast on me by her voice, eyes, touch of her skin, hair, etc., must have surprised nature as much as it did me—aberrant strands of dna straying from the path, producing a rare beauty, the kind that wounds the archer, as with the youngest daughter of the Sicilian king, Psyche, whose jealous mother, Aphrodite, separated from her love.

In V, an incarnation of Psyche’s mythic grace, the soul again divided from animal lust, the marriage of which results in bliss, has her now wed to a sufficient idea—leaving her true lover to peripatetic dispersion of his seed with little purpose. Nature is a pack rat, nothing is discarded, leastwise, recessive genes and in another time her great great great grand child and one of mine will find each other, unite and foster a universe of bliss.

Now, however, V has become a highly successful writer of spiritual guidance books on the covers of which are promotional phrases like, “AN INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD” and “A SOLID FOUNDATION IN GOD’S TRUTH” and “A COMMITMENT TO OBEDIENCE”, while I, her match made in heaven, follow the mandate of my design by writing plays with titles like, “Fast Cars and Slow Orgasms – Cementing a Relationship”.

Having sex with any and every willing object I could hasn’t lead me to feel V’s blush in that one kiss we shared. Though sex is delicious and I’ve grown attached to and possessive about cohorts even though lacking that charged quality I felt with V and after awhile, I came to believe I’d imagined it for if it was real, then I must blame my naive fear and hesitation, not as did V, her disturbed, frightened mother, that prevented me from taking her when I should have, regardless of consequences, at all costs, when I had the chance to play the masculine role libidinous women can’t resist, who want to be taken, held, caressed, ridden, used and put away wet.

A romantic, only at those times, when I became sufficiently pent up and in the coincidental presence of a similarly tensed female, an übermensch arose in me like the reverse metamorphosis of a butterfly becoming lustful blind worm, the result of which held sufficient promise for a woman, leading to relationships, which should have stayed one-nighters but didn’t because of confused romantic ethics when conscientious copulators try to make the lies they told each other, true, or some more pragmatic purpose. Over time, I came to believe I’d imagined the spark of V’s touch or that it was the coincidence of something chemical, impersonal, even childish and unimportant.

When I learned a few years ago about her love affair with Jesus, I felt I had another good reason to lament a religious tradition, which for 2000 years has been the source rapacious ideologies ranging from the genocide of the native population of this hemisphere led by Catholic friars to the horrors of kristalinacht and Auschwitz. I knew about V’s past but very little about how it had affected her after we parted and in my heart I cry that she suffered so long and that, wherever I was, whatever I was doing, I had been so absorbed in my own needs that I didn’t even think to act on her behalf.

But having learned, finally, one day, by accident, that she had found some kind of peace, I saw her books on the shelf a book store in a town on the Oregon Coast and I refused to read one or to take her seriously. Until one day last February, I was telling a girl friend, J, who is also my lawyer and likes to advise me, about what had happened with V and the mystery of that kiss and J said to, “you have no idea about V’s relationship with Jesus…not a clue, not the first idea!” Not one to shirk such a challenge, I borrowed one of V’s books from the public library, coincidentally, along with research I was doing for a play about contemporary sexual predicaments, thus unwittingly tweaking the mentality of the play with an unlikely combination of libertine, spiritual and sentimental points of view. My experience with V has taught me that De Sade was right–Jesus would have to agree.